#323: Gordon Graham on Writing a White Paper with ChatGPT, Predictions for AI’s Impact on Writers...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business.

To a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients.

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With well over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, Mr. Gordon Graham, it's a pleasure to talk to you again, my friend.

That's for sure.

It's been a long time. And here we are.

I think that I went back in your podcast. I think I was your first or second guest in your podcast when you started.

You know, you know what? You were, you were the first guest, and it was. I was my own first guest. Episode one. And then you were episodes two and three, if I recall.

Wow.

We had so much to talk about, we had to break it up into two episodes. So let's see where we go with this one. Here we are, episode 300 and something, and, you know, we're still talking.

Really fantastic, Ed. Well, I think our. I think our topic for today is AI and it's a. It's a huge topic.

It is a huge topic. I suspect you and I are going to be talking about this a few times over the next year or two, if, if you're open to it. But, you know, this thing is evolving so quickly. Right. Yeah, let's. Let's first talk about where we are right now, because I want to timestamp this thing because it's evolving so quickly. We're recording right now in June 2023. And I'm curious, as copywriters, as writers, where are things. Where do things stand right now in this rapidly developing journey?

Well, I think that we're in. Was it you that said the messy middle? You know, I think we're in the very early days of seeing what AI could do. But in terms of churn and confusion and fear and loathing, we're deep into it. And, you know, I kind of. I kind of segment writers into three groups. You know, there's the enthusiast who's already jumped in and is already using AI for almost every project. There's the Resistor, who says, I hate this stuff. I don't care about it. It's going to destroy the profession, and I'm never going to use it. And then there's the people that are somewhere in the middle, the pragmatists who use it sometimes, who are, who are trying it out, testing it out. People may think I'm an enthusiast because I'm, I'm writing about it in my newsletter all the time. But I am a pragmatist, you know, and I think that's a reasonable place for writers to be. We don't want to be on the bleeding edge and we don't want to be the, the late adopters that get steamrolled by, by missing out on something. Being in the middle, middle mainstream is a good place for writers to be because we're not computer scientists and we don't have IT departments, you know, to, to back us up. Most of us are sole practitioners and we have to see the benefit of using this stuff like immediately. And so I'm not spending all day long trying out new products, new AI services, signing up for everything. But I have to tell you, Ed, I listen to five podcasts about AI every week and every single one of them starts every single episode. And they have since January saying this, Wow, I can't believe how much happened in the AI world. How are we going to cover it all? There's so much to cover. There's so many announcements, there's so many new products. There are billions of dollars pouring into this. There are big tech companies are in a life and death struggle with one another. Everybody is trying to one up everybody else. There's a zillion startups that are, that are using the large language models to do some particular twist on them and it is impossible to keep up and impossible to understand everything that's going on. So I just try to kind of keep it to an overview and I think stay pragmatic about it.

I think that's very sensible and this is why I want this discussion to remain about fundamentals, fundamentals and practical ideas and suggestions because we can't possibly be on the bleeding edge and talk about the latest greatest because by the time this publishes that's going to be old news. In fact, I think I saw last month, in May 2023 alone, there were over 2,500 new apps based on AI. AI based apps that just launched in one month. And I think it was like 1500 plus the month before. So it's insane. Let's talk a little bit about the white paper you wrote using ChatGPT, because I found that fascinating and I think it was a brilliant idea. So walk us through your motivation for doing that, how the process went, and then what your thoughts were after once you finished the piece.

Sure, sure. Well, I, I had asked Chat GPT in like January if It could write a white paper. It said no. Other people had asked it. It said no. I saw a few blog articles where people were saying, well, you know, or Twitter things where people were saying, well, you know, clearly AI can't write white papers. And then every couple of weeks I would ask it, one week it said, yes, I can write a white paper of 3,500 words. I was like, wow, did it learn something or, or what? So I thought, well, okay, I'll give this a try. And because I've worked on over 300 white papers for, you know, clients. So I, I, and I wrote white papers for dummies. So I feel like I know the format inside and out. And I, I thought, let's see how Chat GPT really does here. And so I asked it, this was a test from the very start. I asked it, can you give me a list of reasons why people should not use Chat GPT to write a white paper? And you know, I thought it might say, oh, I'm not going to answer that. Oh, I, you know, and it just goes, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. Here's nine reasons. And they were all like, pretty solid reasons. This is the, this is one area where Chat GPT and other AIs are fantastic at brainstorming, right? At coming up with ideas. Like in, in a minute, it had the, the outline for my numbered list and I called it 9 Reasons why Chat GPT can't write your next white paper. And then I went on this odyssey of prompting. I had never prompted it for something this long. And it couldn't write all those words in one go. It had to write them in little chunks of four or five, 600 words. So I got it to write an introduction and then each of the nine pieces and reasons, and then a conclusion. And then I wrote an afterword based on the experience. So it wrote 3,250 words. And I didn't edit it. I just kind of chopped out a hundred words of very repetitive stuff. You know, what it, what I chopped out, it was like, I call it the, the consumer warning. You know, at the end of every chunk it would say, but of course, anything written by Chat GPT must be carefully fact checked by a human. And there is still room for humans. There will always be room for human writers. Like it just said the same, like 50, 75 words, almost every piece of output. So we've got speed, we've got ideas, speed. It just spit out this stuff really, really, really fast. As far as quality, I would say it's, I remember you Were talking about this with one of your guests. How do you, what, what level copy would you say this is? I, I think its first drafts are C minus. C minus. It's not the worst I've ever seen submitted by a professional writer, but it's far from publishable. You know, I've been an editor, I've been a newspaper editor, newsletter editor, a book editor. And what it comes out with for its first draft, unless it's version 3.5 a couple months ago, it was not publishable. Right. It would definitely need an editor. Definitely need some work. So I started re prompting it, I started saying, okay, take, take what you gave me and please make it more sparkling, please make it more readable, please put in some imagery, please put in a figure of speech. And I found it was really, really weak at that, you know, really, really, really poor. It had, has this clunky, wooden style and it, I think I ended up doing 150 prompts. Right, 150 prompts.

Wow. For the whole piece.

Yeah. Yep. And that, so some of that may probably, maybe one third of that is because I wasn't, I was learning how to prompt as well. But I did 10 drafts. I pushed it to rewrite each of those sections 10 times. And you can see it for yourself and judge the quality of the writing. But I'd say it's not B yet. I'd say, I'd say maybe it's B minus, you know, and I, I, I eventually asked it to rewrite it to hit a certain readability level. I usually shoot for 50, you know, on the reading ease out of a hundred. And it told, it said, sure, here it is. This is 50. You know, when I, when I compared, when I retested its chunks, that it said was 50 with, you know, Microsoft Word or readability checker from the web, it said it was 36. So this gets into the reliability, you.

Know, it's very confident, isn't it?

Oh, sure.

Here you go. And it doesn't show any sort of doubt. It just, it just tells you what you want to hear with great confidence. And you believe it.

Yeah, yeah. So it really is true. You really do have to check everything. And its readability analysis was not accurate. And the worst thing about it was the research. So I was just using ChatGPT and asking it for sources, and then I was pushing it for footnotes, and it came up with footnotes, beautifully formatted footnotes, wonderful on point little quotes and sources. And I thought I just about fell off my chair. I thought, this is amazing. Even though it's taking me all these prompts, like, if I get better at prompting, I'll just be able to sit there and talk. And the machine will write a white paper with sources, like, with footnotes. And the research stage of a white paper, I'm finding is the hardest, longest stage these days because there's so much stuff on the web, right? There's so much direct on the web you have to sift through. But let me tell you, it gave me 18 sources with footnotes. Then I said, oh, I'm going to check these. I 16 of them are completely bogus. And the other two I couldn't confirm, even though it's possible they were there because they were talking. One was talking about a survey from a company that had been bought by another company. So their website had changed. So maybe they took down the survey from. From a couple of years ago. Another one was similar, like that, kind of murky. I couldn't find the original source, but I couldn't say it was bogus. The other 16 completely made up. So it made them up so skillfully. It made them up. Like it. It would take an author like Gary Marcus, who is a computer scientist who's written books and has a. Has a blog where he talks about the limitations of AI and these large language models in particular, is what he's really down on. So it had a book by Gary Marcus, a fantastic quote by Barry Gary Marcus, a page number where that quote came from. Okay. Turned out the book did not exist. Gary Marcus exists. And it sounded like something he would say, but I couldn't find that anywhere where he had said that. And then when I would do the next draft, I would say, okay, let's drill down on that Gary Marcus thing, find out where it actually came from. It would come back with perhaps a different book name, perhaps the same book name with a different page number, but the same quote. Perhaps a different quote, but the same page number and the same book, right? So it started to look pretty fishy. And then the funny thing, I don't know if you've seen this, Ed, but the funny thing, it'll say, I'll say, why are you just making this stuff up? And it will say, sorry for the confusion.

Oh, haven't seen that.

This is not. This is not confusion. This is you just making crap up, you know? And it would always say that it's programmed to say that, sorry for the confusion. Here is a more accurate footnote. And then it would be the same old crap. So I ended up being the new Bing had come out with Chat GPT built into it. So I ended up re researching the sources with the new Bing and that was very good and write on and things that I could confirm and footnotes and page numbers. So the new Bing, you know, it has real time access to the web and is good and Chat GPT has that now through plugins and that, that promises to take away that problem. But I would still never submit anything straight out of Chat GPT without checking it and without really rewriting it. I wouldn't hand a white paper like this to a client, you know, with that style. One of the other things I noticed Ed was all of the nine pieces started the same. Large language models may be great at doing this, but they're not so great at doing that. And then it would be the point might be unreliable research. And then it would have a quote and then it would have a bit more discussion and then it would say unlike human readers who can go on the web live and fact check all of their sources and even phone up people and get live quotes. But the thing is, all nine points in the numbered list followed exactly that same structure.

Yeah, same cadence, same rhythm, same everything. Right. It just changing the words.

Yep.

But it has a, well, I mean it's, it's a language model. I mean it's designed to provide information in a certain way. That's part of it, right?

Yeah, yeah. And when I would say to it, okay, mix up this, mix up this section a bit. Don't change the structure, don't move the lead, don't make this like all the others, change it around. No matter how I said couldn't do it. And I found it. What's really frustrating sometimes I would say, okay, you got a good quote, you got a good quote, don't touch the quote. But change this structure, it would rewrite the quote, you know, exactly what I asked it not to. So really somewhat exhilarating, somewhat exasperating is.

So you're, you're finding that now with the new Bing Bing Chat you're able to get much more accurate and reliable research then. And you, I'm assuming you fact checked all of it and those did check out okay.

Yep, yep.

So yeah. And that, that's always been, that's always been the, the idea. This is you know, the first public iteration and we know it's only going to get better from here. So that leads me to then with this experience in mind, everything you're absorbing and processing yourself, let's talk about the pros and the cons. Here in terms of your predictions for the future. Let's start with the, the, the dangers. And then I'd like to discuss a little bit of the, the positive things that may come out of this. And again in the, in the context of writers, copywriters, marketers.

Yeah, absolutely. Sorry I'm drinking such healthy coffee. It has cashew milk and big chunks of cashews in it.

Yeah, mine is, mine is not chunky.

Well, you know, Moore's Law for microprocessors was the idea that roughly every, was it year or two and a half, 18 months, the number of transistors on a chip would double. There's a similar thing at work in the world of AI and it's pretty shocking. Sit down. Every year the power of AI is going up 10x. And I think we can see that. Mid 2022 chat GPT3. It was a bit of a, it was a bit of a, of a joke. I've heard people talk about it and they're like, they couldn't get anything out of it. One year later we're up to chat GPT4, the new Bing plugins, other models like Claude, thousands of new products. You can use this, you can start a business based on AI and run it, a writing business, all, all through AI, I think these days. So that's, that's pretty frightening to think. Like another year from now, chat GPT5 6 is going to be 10 times as good. If it gets 10 times as good, it may never be a level copy, but it might be B plus level copy.

Well, I want to pause real quick because I don't. What you said there is so important that we need to really underscore that because the human mind is not designed to understand compounded growth. So we need to put it in perspective. So what you're saying is in a year, if it's going to be 10x better and it's 10x better because it uses the power that it has today to improve itself. So therefore now it's so much, it's exponentially better. And now that it's better, it's using its new improvements to create even more compounding improvement. Within three years, you don't have 30x. The compounded improvement is much higher than that because it's building on itself. Right. I think that's where the, that's, that's what we all need to understand. And that's just three years. Let's take ten years. Yeah, that. I mean, where are we going to be in 10 years? So anyway, I Just wanted to kind of insert that because this is not linear growth we're talking about.

Yeah, thanks for saying that. Thanks for saying that, Ed. It's almost impossible to imagine, but in terms of the research that's going on, when you have billions of dollars pouring into a certain sector and you have thousands of the smartest people in the world working on it, and there's a gold rush on, they're coming up with ways to train models on much smaller sets of data to have itself train much more intelligently. There's tons of open source. Facebook is being incredible. All of Facebook's AI is open source. Open source is, is one of the leading factors in the AI race right now. This is not just we're going to find more data to train it with and it's going to get smarter. This is like the entire world of technology is focused on making this better. And that's why every week you hear something like, well, there's just a new research paper out about how you can train a new model on like one tenth the data. You know, and it's, you have a good image for this. You know, I like the ladder and I like the flood. I think it's a flood. And how do you, how you do, what do you do when there's a flood? You know what I've heard, I've never seen a flash flood, but I've heard in a flash flood it's like you see the water running down the street and it's like a 2 or 3 inches high and you say, oh, that's nothing, I'm going to get wet feet. I'll just keep walking along. What you're supposed to do, that's the warning. You're supposed to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can run and drop your groceries and run. Because when it's one minute it's three inches high, another couple of minutes it's going to be two feet high and it's going to be sweeping you off your feet. And after that it's going to be over your head. And I think that's what we're, unfortunately, I believe that that's where we're headed. All the signs show me that that's where we're headed, a flood. So what do you do during a flood? You run to higher ground. You've said that all of the low lying commodity providers are going to be flooded. All of the content mills, all of the people. I, I saw a fellow over in Eastern Europe, I, I just was looking on Fiverr and he was like, I will write your white paper in less than 24 hours for 1995 US $19.95. What kind of white paper are you going to get for that? You know, and that was before. That was before AI. That was before AI. So he could do it now with AI. What kind of work are you going to get? All those people I think are going to be flooded because AI is already even cheaper than them. AI is $20 a month for as much as you can crank out. So who would even pay somebody 5, 10, $20 for one piece? Chad, GPT is already better than those commodity writers. So I think they're flooded. They're the first level that's going to be flooded. And I think that you've talked about that on your.

Yeah, they can't leave their house. So they. It's not that they don't want to leave as they can't leave their house. So. Right. The flood's going to take them immediately.

Yep, yep. What's another level? Well, how about agencies? Content agencies. Right. They're not mills, they're agencies. A lot of these agencies were former advertising agencies and the bottom fell out of the advertising business as we know. When the, when the we on everything went digital online, there was a whole new agencies that came along and doing digital advertising and SEO and all that optimizing all that kind of stuff. Content marketing. Any. Most agencies though, their business model is charging by the hour. You cannot charge by the hour anymore. That's over. Because if you say, well we'll write you this blog post for $50 an hour, that sounds pretty, that sounds pretty modest, right? Oh, and it's going to take us five hours. That's $250 and we're going to do four of them for you a month. That's $1,000 a month for your. Keep your blog going at a minimal level and somebody's looking at Chat GPT and they say, well your stuff is good, but it's not 500 times as good as ChatGPT. It's not a thousand times as good as ChatGPT. I know what you're doing, Mr. Agency Guy, is you're going to use ChatGPT to get you ideas and to maybe do a draft and maybe revise your draft and maybe optimize it for SEO. You're going to be using this stuff in the background and charging me how much it would have cost you in the old days and when the clock was ticking. You're not getting away with that anymore. I'll pay you 50 bucks a blog post. This is, this is my prediction that the fees for individual pieces are going to go. Hourly billing is going to go away. All those agencies that can't adapt are going to go away and they're going to have to go to value based pricing and the, and the value is going to be lower because the effort to produce that value is, is much reduced by AI. So do you think I'm onto something there or do you think I'm.

I think you are especially so if we're going to stay with that metaphor. Now we're at higher ground. We're no longer in the valley, we're at the base of the mountain. But I think agencies are different tiers, right? We're talking agencies that are cranking out very basic business to consumer content. And those are definitely not going to be safe. What about agencies, content studios in the B2B market that are really putting out and writing content leadership or thought leadership? Higher end, more sophisticated, nuanced content. I have to believe that they're, you know, certainly higher up the mountain in terms of safety, Tom.

I think that's where everybody has got to go. But there's not enough room for everybody on that mountain top. And you know what I think they got to do is build a giant frickin tower on top of the mountaintop and climb up that tower as high as they can climb too. It's a market, right? So the low end of the market is gone. The mid range of the market fees will fall and the top end of the market will. The best clients with the biggest budgets who, who are using AI wisely, you know, and, and probably have laid off some of their marketing staff, you know, really. But we'll still need, we'll still need outside providers. They will be the creme de la creme and every single person. It'll be like one of those zombie movies. Remember, Remember the World War Zed and the wall in Jerusalem? The wall in Jerusalem and the zombies crawling up over the wall. I don't want to see this. I don't want this to happen. But it could be that there's, there's hundreds of suppliers trying to get one, one spot on that tower on the top of the mountain. And the problem is this is not a biblical flood. This is not a flash flood. This is not something where it rains for 40 days and 40 nights and a few people get in the ark. Well, maybe it is like that, maybe it is like that, but I don't think the rain is going to stop. This is not something that just suddenly, you know, the rain will stop and the ark will land and everybody will get out and it'll be fine. What would stop this from, what would stop AI from continuing to roll on? You know?

Well, maybe now we're living in water world.

Yeah. And some people have these, we have.

To continue this metaphor.

Water world.

You know, it's water world. And now we're living on boats. But, you know, most people.

I'm glad you said that. That's great. That gives me some hope, Ed. That gives me hope.

Well, let's, okay, let, let's work with this a little bit. Right. I think some people are going to be just, they're not going to survive. Right. So those people are moving up the mountain, others are going to give up on the way there. And we're talking the majority of people either not going to survive or give up on the way there. And I'm the majority. I don't want to scare anybody, but we have to all remember that the majority of writers out there aren't competing directly with listeners of this podcast.

Right.

So I want to provide a little bit of perspective here. I don't want people to freak out completely. So this wasn't really a direct issue for you anyway. But if you're already kind of halfway up the mountain and you're seeing this, you know, people running up the hill, what would keep you, what would keep you employed? What would keep you viable? You know, what, what things can you work on when your craft is no longer the differentiator? And I've always argued, don't rely on your writing chops alone, because everyone's saying the same thing. But when that's no longer the thing because you have a computer that can crank out something similar, maybe not now, but, you know, within one to three years, what other competitive differentiators do you have that were still going to be viable?

You know, Ed, this is. I'm really glad you steered us in this direction because I was getting kind of down there and I'm a, I'm a happy go, lucky, positive minded person. I hate thinking about, I hate worrying about the future. So here's, here's what, here's how I dealt with this personally. I'm in my 60s. I could retire. You know, I'm not a, I'm not a millionaire, but I, I could retire and be fine if I never made another penny from my writing. So when I heard about all this AI stuff, I, I really thought to myself, well, this is probably going to really change our industry. Should I bother learning about all this stuff and dealing with all this? I've been a writer. I've written for publication for 50 years. 51 years, actually. When I was 17, I was the editor of my college newspaper, you know, and writing newspaper stories. So I've developed my craft over 50 plus years. Am I, is that all just going to go away and not be meaningless because software has come along and done this? Do I even want to deal with this or do I just want to hang it up and, and quit? And I said, I thought about that for a while and then I said, you know, I want to see what this new stuff is all about and I want to see if I can understand it. I come out of technology, if anybody can understand this. I come out as the software business. Maybe I can understand it and help translate it for my peers, my colleagues, you know, my writing buddies and friends, and maybe I can do something to help the writing community, you know, deal with this. And for me personally, I've never, I've never told anybody this, and I guess it's a dumb thing to announce on the, on your podcast, but here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I'm going to do. I am an expert in one particular format, white papers. A lot of people, a lot of marketing people are wondering, can I just use AI and just press a couple of buttons and give a couple prompts and get a decent white paper out? White papers are still popular. They're, they're not going away. The latest figures I saw showed that, you know, marketers love white papers more than any other type of format. And what I'm going to do is, is launch a new service. You know how, you know how there's the idea of, of do it yourself and done for you. Well, I think there's some space in the middle there. Done with you.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm going to launch a done with you service for marketing people that want to use AI to write white papers. And I'm going to bring my, my deep knowledge of that format to the table to help them learn how to prompt and learn how to polish. And if they need to hire me to polish their white paper so that in a very short time, for less than they would have paid in the old days, they'll get a respectable white paper out. So I'm going to offer a strategic combination, human writing skill plus AI service. And that'll be starting summer or fall. You know, so I think that that's what people have to do is Operate on a strategic, a really strategic level. And here's something we were going to talk about that I think is important. Talk about AI with your clients. Don't let it be the elephant in the room. You know, I have, I have decided I deliberately talk about AI with my clients. And those have been fascinating conversations. When I land a white paper, I just, I'm working on a white paper right now and I said to my client, well, you know, I've been toying around with AI and I'd like to use it to help me be more productive on this project. Nice way to position. Who's going to say, no, I don't want you to be productive on my project? Right. My client says, oh, I'm so glad you mentioned that. You know, my manager is coming by every single day. He's walking around the entire company saying, are you using AI? Why don't you get use AI for that? Hey, how are you using AI today? Hey, did you discover anything about a. Our manager is walking around urging us all to use AI all the time, and I'm doing it and how do you like it? Well, what do you find? It works well at. Oh, you know what? I had to do this thing, I had to go on the zoom and I didn't know the person and I just asked the AI to tell me about the person and tell me about their area. And I got like this incredible briefing in one minute that would have taken me 15 minutes to get from Wikipedia or LinkedIn, you know, and so I've had these exciting conversations with my clients because nobody has this figured out. Everybody is, is confused and a lot of writers are afraid of bringing it up. Oh my goodness. There. I can't talk about AI with my, my client's gonna think I'm just gonna press a button and then hand in what I've got. So I've, I've got a policy, a deliberate policy that I came up with, which is, you know, I, I, at the very start, I, I talk honestly with my prospects about AI I'll probably use AI for brainstorming. I might use AI if, if you give me a 75 page report, I might get it to sum it up for me or ask it. What are the, Are there any great sound bites in here? I might even get it to draft a section. But I will never, I promise to you, I will never just give you what AI gives me. I will always rewrite it and revise it and polish it and humanize it and make it my best possible work. So I'm going to use AI to speed up my production on your project, but I'm not going to just hand you something out of AI. What, what client would mind hearing that?

I love that. Well, like the only thing playing devil's advocate here, Gordon, maybe not the right kind of client, not the client that you would want, but is there a possibility that a client might say, we're fine with that, but you need to lower your fee because we know it's going to take you less time.

You know what? Fine. They're right. They're right. If a NARA white paper takes me two weeks and using AI brings it down to one week, why should all that benefit flow to me? And why should I be in that precarious situation with a client who can say, you know what, that damn guy, you know, charges the same fee and then he told us he was going to use AI? Clients aren't stupid. I'm prepared for fees to fall. Fees, I think for writing are going to fall. How could they not? If, if we gain this a fantastic production tool that can make us 50% more productive, how can we justify keeping the same fees? I mean, we could, we could drop our fees by 25% without blinking and we're still ahead of the game. We can drop them 35% and we're still ahead of the game if we're gaining 50% on that white paper. I did that first one and I'm in the middle of some other experiments too. It saved me about one third of the time to do even.

Even though you were learning as you went in terms of prompting with all.

Those screw ups, even re researching. I figured that white paper would have taken me two weeks to research and do the old way. And it took me three days. You know, interesting so and so maybe that's more than a third, but I mean that was spaced out over, you know, over time and everything so.

Well, not to, not to go down a rabbit hole here, but to be fair, we were talking about, number one, a number list white paper which would be one of the. You've said this, it's one of the easiest or maybe the easiest to write. Number two, it was a kind of a mainstream topic, you know, it wasn't an esoteric topic that, you know, ChatGPT would be lost in.

No interviews. No interviews.

No interviews. So I'm wondering how much, how much productivity gains you would get, you know, in a, in a much more nuanced, esoteric topic, at least today.

Yeah, I, I think 25 to 35%. You know, interesting I can see it at the initial stage. Really, really powerful to come up with a. With a framework or some ideas or titles. Right. Good titles. And it, you know, the thing is, it's like a. Working with it is like. It's like working with a. An. A really keen intern or a writing buddy who never gets frustrated, is always happy, is always confident. You. You shred its work and say, like, go back to the drawing board and redo this. Sure, I'd be happy to redo that just the way you want. You know, it's happy in its work, and so you can go in day or night and ask it to do anything. And we're just scratching the surface. I'm just scratching the surface of what it's capable of doing and what it will be in the next few. Few weeks. So I'm expecting fees to go down, value to go up and everybody to be happy, like, time to. Time to deliver to go down too. So with a. With a. An excellent client and an excellent writer and wise use of AI, those people will still be in business, I think.

Yeah. Well, so here's a. Along those lines, I have another question for you. This room, I think it's helpful to think of other situations where something like this has happened, meaning a serious disruption, because we need to put it in context. Otherwise it feels like the sky is falling and we're all doomed. Okay. Which, you know, I think we need to be cautious, but there's still some positives. This, in a way, and specifically when I say this, I'm talking about prompt engineering, because if you're talking about a done for you service, you're talking about you being the conduit between the technology and the client. You're there to train them, but also to show them how to coax the right information from the tool. Okay. We're at a stage right now. This reminds me a lot of 1993 with the early days of the Internet, before browsers. I remember driving to Barnes and Noble to buy a dummies book about HTML code, because at the time, that was the only way you could really get on the Internet, you know? And I want to say it was 93, but may have been 94. Still. The point is, there was a moment in time when some geeks went out there and figured out how to use the Internet.

Right?

And they were the ones that people went to, oh, that's so cool. Hey, could you look this up for me? You know, and they were the conduit 94 or so suddenly we had browsers, we had the World Wide Web and now everybody could use this. Now it was still early days. Like, where do you go? There was no Google at the time. There were some search engines, but it was this whole world of possibilities. You could waste a lot of time. And that's what we were all doing. We're wasting time. So back to where we are today. It seems that we have a window right now that's ideal for what you just described. We have clients who don't have the time, the energy or the knowledge to know how to use these tools appropriately. And then we, if we're smart, we're going to learn how to do that not only so we could use it for our own good when working in client projects, but to offer a done for you service and be that conduit and teach them to fish. Do you see that window evaporating or closing? And what I mean is, will there come a time very soon where the. You won't really need great prompt engineers because the technology will be so good that just like with the World Wide Web, anyone can Google, anyone can find a website, anyone can find the research. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad I'm loving this conversation, Ed, because you're giving me all kinds of hope and new ideas and stuff. And I think that's a very apt metaphor for the, the early days of the web. I was not interested. People would be showing me like I was working in a software company and writing manuals and the geek would be calling me over, look at this, look at this thing. And it would be this horrible mess on the screen, right? And you can find all these books. And I'd like, I'll just go, I'll just go to my bookshelf or I'll go to a bookstore or I'll go to a library. I'm not looking at that. And then you see the book and it's unreadable on the screen, right? It was just, it was kind of a joke. And this is I guess to update that to today the. My problem with the writing market. And I'll start at the most basic level. Everybody thinks they can write, everybody can type on their computer. And now everybody can say a type of prompt into chat GPT and get something out that's okay. You know, it's a basic write up about anything that they can get, you know. So who are the best prompters? Who are the best people to use AI to accomplish anything? Those are going to be the people that are a cut above in their, in their background knowledge. Of some field, Right. So I could go and try and get Chat GPT to write me some software code. I couldn't tell which end of it is up. I couldn't tell if it was any good or not. A really good programmer can get it to write code and tell anyone, oh, that's pretty good. But find the little flaws in it and make it better. Same with a writer. A writer that knows what, what makes really good content will be able to prompt and evaluate what's coming out of the AI and say, like, it's okay, but it could be better. Can you make it like this? Can you do that? Can you bring in this? Can you, you know, push it to make it do better? And I think that's the value of a seasoned. Going to be a seasoned practitioner in any field, you know, is they will get the most out of these tools and that's not going to change over time. I mean, like, so say you have a million case studies fed into an AI and it'll write you a case study. Well, who is going to evaluate whether that case study makes any sense or not when it comes out? Somebody who knows case studies. So it will be the marketing person who works as an editor or it will be a writer who takes that and, and can say, well, it would be good, but we really need this, we really need that, you know, and we could make a pun on the name of the company, you know, and add that, add that, that last 20%. That makes all the difference.

All the difference.

Absolutely, absolutely. That turns something from being flat and pedestrian to being something, you know, crisp and clear and sparkling. So that's, that's craft, but it's an element of craft. It's, it's background knowledge of your format that you're writing or background knowledge of.

The market in the audience that you're writing to.

Yes, yes.

Right. If, if you spent 12 years in the construction industry and, yeah, I don't know, wherever. And now you're helping a construction software company write this white paper. There are nuances in that, in that paper that you can have that will make all the difference because the reader, the, one of the, you know, it's a sniff test. Right. They, they can smell it a mile away. This was written by someone who doesn't know what they're facing day to day. Yeah, but if you add little bits and pieces, that shows them. I get you. I know exactly what you're thinking right now, what you're dealing with and what's keeping you up at night. Ah, you have to Live that.

That is so right on. That is so right on. And I, I wonder if the AI systems will ever have that. You know, they may actually never have that. So am I worried about the future of things like case studies and white papers? No, case studies I think are really, really as AI proof as you can get. Because look what you have to do for a case study. You have to have a person to person interview. Sometimes clients want to, want to just send the questions into their customer and have them send back emails. Those are never as good as when you get in a conversation just like we're having now because you discover new things, you get great sound bites, you get really much better detail. So a person to person interview that AI can't do, then you have to tell a story, an interesting story with a challenge that's overcome a before and after. You know, a hero's journey. Can AI do that? I don't know. I wouldn't trust it these days. That's for sure to do.

It's not going to sing for sure. It's going to be very mechanic.

Yep.

Yeah, I, I, I think that's, those are. Okay, so a few things. This gives me hope too. I think it's the knowing there's an art to prompting. I hate that it's called prompt engineering because that implies left brain activity when it's really a right brain activity. Right. I think we writers and I know you've written about this, we are much better positioned to be become better prompt engineers than your typical engineer, so to speak, or somebody like a client's office who just doesn't have the time. That's the other thing to keep in mind. Will clients really invest the time and the energy necessary to use these tools, you know, to the way that to a point where they can, they don't need us? I doubt that very much. Um, I think you're going to see it again in the low lying areas. But as you go up the mountain I think that's going to be harder to find. I mean you're already dealing with marketing directors who are going from one meeting to the next to the next to the next. They don't even have time to process. Their amygdala is like on full alert. Their creative power is gone. So they need us, number one. Number two, I think you're, I love that idea of the last 20%. You know, that's really where it matters and I'll even throw this out there. In a world where more and more content will be AI generated, it's really the human content that's going to truly stand out. So in a way, that's another way we could look at it, right? It's okay, bring it on, bring it on. Because my stuff is going to stand out so much more.

Yep, yep. And in terms of white papers, they've been around for well over a hundred years and I, I can't see any end of them. Because what does a good white paper do? It helps a business person to understand an issue that they want to understand to solve some kind of problem, nagging problem in their business or to make a decision about which way to go with something. As long as there are businesses, as long as there is business people, they're going to want to do those things and they're going to want, need information from outside the company to be able to do that. So that's what I call a white paper. Some kind of amalgamation of information, carefully assembled information that makes a persuasive point about some issue or some problem or some decision. And whether they will be on paper like printed as PDFs and read on the screen, or whether they will be some kind of micro site or whether they'll be delivered in some format that hasn't been invented yet. Like, I think that business people will need that kind of information. They're not going to get it from TikTok, they're not going to get it from Pinterest. You know, when a company has a big decision to make, they want facts and numbers and cost benefits and solid analysis and they argue about it, they discuss about it. This is what I was really fortunate to work in B2B, you know, and to, and to work in companies where we had to make these kind of decisions. I remember when desktop publishing came out, I had to, I had to spec out a system, a desktop publishing system for a newspaper. I had to spec out a typesetting system. And you better believe when you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, you don't just watch a couple of videos or read something that AI gave you and make a decision. You go to meetings and meetings and you get grilled and people say, what about this, what about that? You've got a bean counter in the room, you know, and you've got the, often you've got the HR person who is saying, well, what about my people? What about the training? How, how hard is this thing going to be to use? And you've got the, the COO who's saying, well, how are we going to roll this thing into our process? What are we going to have to throw out. How long is this going to take? You got the CEO who's, who's the, you know, the one where the buck stops at his desk and he doesn't want to make a, a blunder that looks terrible on him. So I think that's part of the going up the mountain thing. The, the better clients are going to be the ones that are selling the most expensive things because for their, their clients to buy those expensive things, they need to provide a lot of information that has to be assembled by writers. So don't, don't look. I used to say a white paper, you know, if you're selling something less than 50,000, you know, you probably can't justify a white paper. Now I'm thinking maybe it's like going to be if you're selling something for less than half a million, you can't justify hiring a writer to do a white paper. There's still a lot of companies out there selling expensive systems. Maybe it'll be if you're selling something less than 2 million, you can't justify hiring a writer. So look for the companies that are selling really expensive things and that's another way to find, to find future clients during this, during this flood thing and stay on the top of the mountain.

Well, want to add to that because somebody might say, well, yeah, but you just talked about 10x improvement over the next year. Won't it get to a point where a company can write a pretty good white paper with AI? My argument would be this. At least I haven't seen this yet, or see, I don't even see the promise of this happening anytime soon is the ability to really connect dots. So it seems to be very good at linear thinking, logic. But we all know that a white paper is not just pure logic. There is a hidden emotional, human conscious element there that very, very. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it with the stuff that's come out of Chat GPT. No, that you're really missing. And we've talked about some of this already, but I really want to emphasize that I'm not sure, I'm not sure if we'll get there or we'll get there anytime soon. At least with this technology, you're still going to need the human to connect the dots, to tell the story, to provide that element, the nuances that are really going to take this piece to a level that's going to connect with that audience.

I think you're right. And, and Chat GPT admitted that much in, in the white paper that it.

Oh, there you go.

One of the, one of the nine reasons not to use it to write a white paper was because it has trouble identifying with an audience. And a related issue was it has trouble showing cultural sensitivity or.

Great point.

You know, understanding diverse groups of people and, and you know, like I say, a customer base that's maybe somewhere outside of where it was trained in Southern California. You know, like, I mean the thing about all this AI stuff is it's being done by the tech Bros. In California and they get over to another part of the world and sometimes it can't cope with what it's encountering or being asked.

You know, and when cultural sensitivity is becoming more and more and more important, I mean, this is not going to be able to, to catch up to that.

Yeah. And you don't just take this whole swath and, and make it out of bounds. We, we don't, we don't talk about that. We don't talk about what's his name? Emo. We don't talk about the guy in the song from the, the Disney movie. We don't talk about.

Oh, we don't talk about. Not Nemo. Yeah, it's uh. Yeah.

Yeah. There's another, there's another point for what that applies to both case studies and white papers and probably other formats of B2B is the, these AIs are trained on public information. Right. Or you have an in company, one that you've trained on your, your in company voice. Maybe that, that's going to come and that's fine. But say you're working on some breakthrough product, you know, where you've done re. A company's done independent research, they've done independent development, they've, they've taken some science and like really pushed it to the limit. And there's nothing out there, not even one research paper out there because they're doing this in stealth mode. What is the AI going to know about that? It's going to know squat. Is it going to be able to interview these, these egghead scientists? Absolutely not. You know, is it going to be able to get them to, to sit there and type? No, you're going to need a person to interview those, those really brainy people and translate what they're saying into normal language that, that a customer could understand. So that applies to a lot of content for new products. Right. So look for, look for expensive new breakthrough products, you know, is I think where AI is not going to be.

Able to deliver well and one we haven't really talked about directly has been elevating your value to the advisory level. I mean, we talked about it indirectly with your done with you idea. But I really believe this is where more and more writers need to move. It's the, hey, forget about just the craft of writing. You need to be able to provide advice, insights, perspectives, new ideas, help clients connect the dots because again, they're too busy. But you're focused, you know, a little bit more and you're looking at it from a different angle. I see so many writers doing, when they do do it, they're doing it for free. And I think this is, we need to start looking at that as a, as a, as a revenue center, as a way to really move up the value ladder, the value mountain. And we're going to stay with that. And AI can't duplicate that.

Right? Right on, Ed. And that goes right back to the name of my business, that white paper guy. I have a very common name, Gordon Graham. And in any city there's a dozen Gordon Grahams. When I went to set up my website many Years ago, Gordon Graham.com was already taken. So I was like, I, ah, what am I going to have for a name? What am I going to have? And I remembered in my, in my B2B companies where I was working, we would always say, oh, we got to, we gotta get our trade, our trade show booth redone this year. Call it that trade show guy. You don't remember a person's name so much as what they do or their specialty or their niche, but there's only one trade show guy. And everybody in the company knows who you're talking about and somebody has this phone number somewhere, right? So I just said that white paper guy as like the guy that knows about white papers. And you know, there's not that many, there's not that many formats that everybody can be a guy, but like for a certain format. But maybe you can be that writer guy in your industry, in your niche, you know, and there's lots of room for naming yourself and going to market that way. And that is, is kind of fun and memorable. And you know, I see, I want to go back to this craft thing because I do see people saying another, another big transition that I, that I think of is the, it was before our time, but it was the rise of, of typesetting and there was the typesetters unions for newspapers and they were really skilled craftspeople. I mean, they knew all the dingbats and the names of them and how to space things out by hand. By putting letters into those little wooden, wooden boxes, right? Typesetting machines came out where you, you would have a keyboard and you would press a key and the, the little piece of metal would just fall down right where you wanted it to fall. You didn't need those guys to have their hands in the boxes of type. Some few number of the typesetters learned how to use the new systems, but most of them resisted and the unions resisted and they became irrelevant. And they were all talking about, but it takes, it takes hand quality to really set this type. And we know, you know, just what I said. We know all the names of the dingbats and we know how to space things out. And we've been doing this for a hundred years. So what? So what? They became irrelevant because that skill had been built into a machine and now there's software that you can use to do all those kind of adjustments and there's every dingbat in the world and there's every font in the world and all of us in offices can do that thanks to, to desktop publishing. So when I see writers saying, even, even as, as lovable as Ann Handley, I mean, I love Anne Hanley, I've got all her books, I, I follow her. But even she sometimes gets on her soapbox and says, you know, it's quality, it's the quality of writing. That's, that argument doesn't work when you, when with a bean counter. It doesn't work with somebody whose budget is being, is being challenged. And so, and their manager is saying, well, why don't you just use AI? I've talked to people who say my manager told me to just get AI to write all our case studies from now on. And I'm trying to push back, but guess where that manager is hearing that? From their manager. From their manager up and down the corporate ladder because people are hearing all this noise and a lot of, a lot of company executives, as you say, don't have much time to really grasp stuff. So all they hear is AI can do it all now, you know, AI can do that for you. And there are going to be layoffs. Absolutely, they're going to be layoffs. There's going to be millions of people whose, whose, you know, professional jobs go poof and companies will, will maximize what they can get AI to do and minimize their, their headcounts and their payrolls. That's, that's business.

I mean, well, and especially as we're heading into a difficult economy, I mean, we could be facing a recession right now, or you know, later this year. So that's only putting more pressure on us, so.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, in a way, though, freelancers can be lucky. Right. They can ride that out. True.

No, I mean, I'm talking about the profession as a whole. Right. In terms of cost cutting.

Yeah.

This is not the, the best, the best time for, for this to have come out.

Yeah. So we've covered a lot of. We've covered a lot of things here, you know, and I just, I guess to. To sum it up, what I think is AI is fast and it's cheap. It's not that good today, but it's going to get better and better. Better very quickly. There's a flood happening. You got to get to higher land and you got to get to that top of the mountain. We've talked about a few ways to do that. That 20%, that was a very useful idea, I think, and that maybe it's that you add that 20%, you do a strategic service and you charge for that service, and you become the, the go to guy or gal for your industry, your niche, your type of document. You become the indisputed leader, maybe in a small handful of leaders, but you become the person they think of and the last person they would ever lay off. And, you know, I do have something hopeful that we could touch on. You know, like what I say to my clients is, you know, I'm never going to hand in something straight out of. Out of AI I'm always going to revise it and make it sparkle. And there I've got a list of 12 things that writers can do that AI still can't and may never be able to do. And we have talked about some of these. I don't know if we have time to run through them, Ed, or.

Yeah, why don't we. I think that's a good way to close because it's. It's on a positive note, and I think we'll get everyone thinking a little differently.

Okay. And we're. We're going to make this available as a, as a downloadable checklist with a link in your, in your show notes, right?

Yes, absolutely. So you should. If you go to the show notes page now, you should see a link to it.

Yeah, yeah. So these are things that I've learned over the past few months and in talking to many other writers. I mean, I talk to people all the time about this stuff and listen to podcasts. So 12 things writers can do that AI can't. And I'm calling this humanizing. Humanizing your content. First person you write as I to create an intimate tone. AI might be able to write as I, but it, it is not going to sound like a real person. Number two, sensory details. Whether you're writing fiction or non fiction content, try to create scenes, have colors, smell, sounds, textures. Kind of immerse your reader in a. In a concrete scene. That's a really powerful traditional writing technique. Not used very much in B2B, but it could be and it should be personal anecdotes. Share your lived experience to show your own personal history. The insights you've learned. Make yourself a bit vulnerable. And this is what you can do with your intended reader too. You can, you can allude to their lived experience, their issues and problems. Right. When working in the company. Humor. AI just not get jokes or puns. You know, I, I've tried to. I've spent probably more time trying to get chat GPT to write me a decent joke than anything else, you know, and it's terrible. Jokes, puns, witticisms, double entendres. It just.

That's an art form. Yeah, that's. That takes. You end up with a bad dad joke.

Yeah, yeah. So that's what I was saying with about the case studies. I always like to make a pun on the name of the company, you know, and that AI is never going to do that. And parables sum up a point with a very apt parable that people have heard before that, that resonates down through the ages. It could be something from the Bible. It could be something from another piece of wisdom literature. It could be something from a children's story or a fairy tale. Very powerful. AI will never do that. Never do. You can ask it, I've asked it. Come up with a parable. Doesn't know what I'm talking about. Questions. This is a powerful one that I always use. You know, when you, when you get to a point, ask your. Imagine what your reader is wondering about. Anticipate their questions. Who, what, why, where, when, how? They're going to be asking, well, how did that happen anyway? So then you tell them how it happened right there. You don't wait. You don't wait for another page. Answer the questions that are arising in a person's mind, a reader's mind, pop culture. Add a line from a recent pop song. Mention some kind of character or situation from a recent movie that adds relatability. AI has not seen all the latest movies. You know, it does not know all the comic book characters. It does not know the pop stars. And if it knows them, it doesn't know why anyone cares about them. You know, it may have heard of Taylor Swift. Can it quote any Taylor Swift? Can it come up with a perfect Taylor Swift title song title that you could drop and rate there in your, in your piece? I highly doubt it.

No, it needs, it needs to know context. It won't have that.

Yeah, that's one of the things in, in the nine reasons, you know, is context, cultural context. It doesn't have a clue. Wordplay. Now you may not be able to use this all the time in, in B2B, but poetic wordplay can really transport readers. So there's assonance is vowels, sibilance. Is that sound of like s. Automatopoeia. Are. Is the sound of like the crack of a whip. You know, use, use some of that to add some, some crackle to your sentences once in a while. And metaphors, you know, metaphors. B2B needs a lot more metaphors compare vastly different things to show connections that would never occur to an AI and if you come up with a powerful metaphor, that's the same as a big idea. Come up with a big idea, a really powerful metaphor that will tie your whole piece together. That is powerful. And A.I. you know, I've asked it, I've asked it.

It's a right brain function. This is not a right. This tool does not. Technology does not have a right brain.

Yep, yep, yep. And rhetoric, you know, learn and mine some of the timeless rhetorical devices, you know, for very memorable phrasing. So think of Shakespeare, Macbeth tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. No way I would ever write that in a million years. Unless you ask it. You know, write me a sonnet in the style of Macbeth. But you're writing B2B. You're prompting B2B content. It will never write that. But I just have so much fun just reading about rhetoric. You know, we don't. They don't teach it in schools anymore. And it used to be one of the cornerstones of a, of a liberal.

Education for thousands, not even in many liberal arts colleges. Just amazing to me. Yeah.

And yet what is more, what is more about using words than rhetoric? Rhetoric is about how to use words to influence your audience. Well, what is content marketing? What is copywriting if not that literature sort of on the same lines. AI has scanned many, many, many books, but it doesn't know how to draw on them. So use an, use some kind of epigram that, that a well known author said. You know, call up some kind of fable, a God or a goddess. A myth, a Timeless story from antiquity. And that will add some kind of depth or resonance to your, to your piece. That AI would, it would never do that, even if you ask it. The current state is it doesn't know what you're talking about and it will confidently give you some pap. That doesn't answer your question. Right, and here's the final one. Here's the final one. Now, these may be hard to work in, but I think that this is the supremo one here. Number 12. Compassion, curiosity, empathy, forgiveness. These are supremely human virtues, you know, that will make any story richer and less predictable. You want your content, you want your writing not to be predictable. So if you're, if you're talking about some terrible problems and suddenly your, your reader has an insight about how it's not as bad as they thought it was, or they could look at it a different way, or they could just be a little curious and find out about this one thing, or they could, they could forgive the person that caused the problem. You know, use supremely human emotions and, and try to work those in. See, this is, this is new. Like, I've never said that before, that B2B writers should do that. This is fiction writing, right? But we should use some of the techniques of fiction writing to make our content writing more human and more resonant.

And that's, that's in an age where we're going to be flooded with more and more of this AI powered content. This is where we need to go to stand out. So I would argue that if you haven't used some of these techniques, now is the time to start. And I'll say this, Gordon, what you just shared with us reminds me so much of the pivotal scene in the movie Good Will Hunting, if so powerful, when Matt Damon, Robin Williams was seated at the park and he can't get through to this kid. And if you haven't, if you've seen the movie, you know exactly the scene I'm talking about. If not, this is a wonderful movie. Everyone should watch this. So Robin Williams is a therapist. Matt Damon is this kid who's absolutely brilliant. He's a genius, and he's read every book. He knows all the facts. He knows all this information, right? But this is left brain. This is just facts and figures and in trivia. And Robin Williams can't get to him. Just can't get through to him. And he tells him at the park, he says, I spent all night last night thinking about all the hurtful things you said to me and why I can't get through to you. And I'm paraphrasing, but he says something to the effect of. And it finally hit me. You may know all these things, you may be able to quote this, that you may be able to do these complex max math problems, but here's what you don't know. You haven't lived these things. You haven't lived these situations. You haven't been through this pain. You haven't experienced this joy, you know, And I feel sorry for you because that's what you're missing. That's the humanity of it all. And it's such a, I mean, to me, where we are right now, that is the scene, that movie scene I feel describes where we are right now. And that gives me reassurance that, hey, there, there is hope. We are dealing with this. We got a big Matt Damon out there right now who's threatening everybody where it feels that way. But we need to remember that the end of the day, Matt Damon hasn't lived these things, hasn't had these experiences. And that's where we come in and that's where we could really add humanity and truth to, to the work.

Right on, Ed. Right on. That is a beautiful and true and probably a great way for us to close out today.

Yes, this has been fascinating, Gordon and I know we've been talking about doing this for a while, so I'm glad, I'm glad we, we finally had the conversation. I suspect I'm going to be, I'm going to be coming back to you and see if we can do a recap or revisit this later on this year if you're, if you're game for that.

Well, the water line will be higher at that point. But I, I think the advice we came up with is really true and will be, will be kind of evergreen advice, right?

Yes. Yes. So thank you again for, for spending some of your day with, with us. I appreciate you as always. And guys, we'll have the links here in the show notes, so check out Gordon stuff and, and where can, where can folks learn more about you and your work? Subscribe to your newsletter, which is wonderful.

Oh, great. Great. Well, it's that white paper guy.com and if you search on that white paper guy.com, if you search for can chat GPT write a white paper or if you just search for chat GPT, it'll come up where you can download that, that white paper that I did. And, and then our, our 12 things writers can do to Humanize Their Content. That'll be a download on, on the podcast show notes. So, you know, thank you, Ed. You have made me feel a lot better about this. You know, it's. We, we may be facing a flood, but I think we've got some, we've got some really practical things to do and, you know, I'm, I'm doing them.

There you go. That's all we can do.

Day.

Day to day. Day to day. Gordon, thanks again. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Yeah, Ed, that was great. We always come up with. You can cut this part off, but I, I feel like we're, we, we feel our way through and we come up with some great, some great ideas together. You know, it's not like I start off, off with like all this, you know, knowledge to impart. I feel like we have a really true conversation. So it was, that was great.

We do. We're just in here having coffee. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Burn More in Less Time, the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy@bblauncher.com where you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.